On another note, I am convinced that these weird new recaptchas from Google have little to do with foiling bots and spam and a lot more to do with using unsuspecting naive users to help Google train its AI. Think about it, these tests are long, cumbersome and annoying; hardly an advance for useability if the goal is to simply separate humans from computers. But from the perspective of training their AI to be better at image recognition, we are giving Google a gold mine of data when we solve these photo puzzles for them. If you’ve taken enough of these tests you can see that there is often ambiguity in what might be a correct answer such as when they ask you to identify “street signs”, for example does the post the sign is sitting on top of count as part of a “street sign”? When Google asks a user to identify rivers it will clearly accept solutions that contain other types of bodies of water or at least pictures with a body of water that cannot be conclusively identified. The same goes for the puzzle asking the user to identify “store fronts”. A test designed to separate humans from machines in the fastest most efficient manner would not look like this nor would it be so long and cumbersome. Sometimes I’ve encountered these tests and had to go through 3 or 4 different puzzles continually getting the message “Multiple correct solutions required – please solve more.”

Be wary of what information you supply to these tech giants and by extension the government. If you don’t absolutely have to supply it, think twice about doing so. If you don’t look out for your own privacy, no one will.